


In the Company of Wolves

by sequence_fairy



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Bad Wolf, Episode: s01e13 The Parting of the Ways, F/M, First Kiss, The typical amount of angst as is normally associated with this particular series of events, all of time and space made flesh and bone and he kissed it out of her, we stan one man who really wanted their first kiss to fucking count
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:00:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28230531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sequence_fairy/pseuds/sequence_fairy
Summary: On the screen, the Dalek emperor cackles and threatens, but the Doctor doesn’t hear, he’s focused inward. The TARDIS’ song rings in the chambers of his hearts, the tune resonant but not quite on the same frequency as it was when he sent her away with Rose packed up inside.There’s something though, something in the back of his mind; a howling.The Doctor sent Rose away, to keep her safe. He hadn't expected her to come back.
Relationships: Ninth Doctor/Rose Tyler
Comments: 14
Kudos: 35





	In the Company of Wolves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zjofierose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zjofierose/gifts).



> For Zjo. 
> 
> Thanks to Heidi and Ember for the beta. 
> 
> Zjo, I know you wanted more words, but these are the ones that I have. I hope you like them.

Regeneration will fix most anything, but getting spaced is pretty much permanent; even he can’t last in hard vacuum for long enough to find the next outpost all the way out here. The Doctor takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders. Coward that he might be, he will not meet his end with his chin down and his shoulders hunched in fear. It will be with spine straight and eyes hard.

On the screen, the Dalek emperor cackles and threatens, but the Doctor doesn’t hear, he’s focused inward. The TARDIS’ song rings in the chambers of his hearts, the tune resonant but not quite on the same frequency as it was when he sent her away with Rose packed up inside.

There’s something though, something in the back of his mind; a howling. 

There’s the ripple in space-time from the TARDIS launching herself back to him, but something’s off, like it’s not quite the same TARDIS that left coming back. He supposes Rose could have found another version of himself, sweet-talked them into taking her back to him. Some past iteration, because there’ll be no future ones, not now. 

All the clamouring thoughts in his mind - Rose, the TARDIS, the fate of the universe - they come to a dead halt.

He’d thought he was going to do this alone, is the thing. He hadn’t counted on Rose. Stupid of him not to, really. He should have. It’s why he picked her after all, why he picks them all; for their tenaciousness, for their never-say-die, for their ability to keep on running. He hopes she’ll forgive him for sending her away. He hopes she knows it was the hardest thing he’s had to do since he had to get up and keep going when he thought he’d lost her earlier today. 

The Doctor’s hands flex against the legs of his trousers, remembering the way the dust he’d thought was Rose had sifted through his fingers. Remembering the roaring in his ears, and then the exhilaration of seeing her again, hale and whole and perfect. If he’d been blind to how much he loved her before, he knew in that moment; his heart cracked open with relief and the joy of her smile. 

At least he had that, even if it was all for naught in the end. 

The wind rises first, as it always does, as space and time come apart at the seams to let the TARDIS slip in between the cracks. But it’s accompanied this time by a rising howl, something he’s never heard before in the vortex, in all his long years. It makes the hairs stand up on the back of his neck, makes goosebumps rise all along the back of his arms, even under the thick sleeves of his jumper. 

The thud of the TARDIS’ landing is overshadowed by the rest of the noise as the vortex eddies and swirls around the edges of the TARDIS’ shields. He turns to face his home, his most trusty companion. When the doors open, he’s blinded by the spill of golden light and both his hearts seize in his chest, breath catching and shattering against his ribs. He knows that light - he’s seen it inside the TARDIS, caught glimpses of it through the rotor light and down underneath the console, and when he’s had to carefully re-assemble her when something he asks her to do tears her apart. 

The light spills, unfettered now, from the inside of the TARDIS, her doors open wide. 

Terror wings up the Doctor’s spine. There’s no sign of Rose. He can’t make out anyone inside, and all he can taste is the huon radiation in the air. It hangs, heavy and metallic, on the back of his tongue. The Doctor swallows, but the taste remains. 

When she finally steps out, her eyes glowing gold and her hair streaming around her face, the Doctor’s knees buckle and he lands, hard, amongst the mess of cables behind him. The Daleks in their line are silent, blue eyes turned to face Rose as she coalesces from the glow of the interior of the TARDIS.

She’s beautiful. 

She’s dying. 

“What’ve you done!?” He’s asking, but he knows. He can see it. The vortex itself turns in her eyes, whiskey brown turned to the yawn of time and space, glittering gold and terrifying. The memory of looking into the vortex as a child haunts him, still. The Doctor swallows hard against the rise of the remembered panic; he doesn’t have time for a memory lifetimes old now.

“I looked into the TARDIS and the TARDIS looked into me.” Rose’s voice echoes with the vortex, winding around her words. Her hair lifts and lowers in the phantom wind of the vortex. The Daleks watch, ignoring the Doctor entirely.

“You looked into the time vortex! Rose, no one’s meant to see that!” The Doctor’s hearts trip double-time in his chest. She’ll come apart at the seams, and he’ll have no way to stop it. No way to save her. She’s going to be consumed. His mind races; options are discarded as soon as they’re thought of. 

She’s leaking huon radiation and the tachyon particles in the room are thick enough that the Doctor’s starting to be able to feel them against his skin. No matter what the end is here, this place is going to come apart as time starts to affect the molecular cohesion of everything around them. He has to figure out how to get the vortex out of Rose and put it back into the TARDIS, where it belongs, where it’s safe, and he has to do it without killing Rose.

He’s frozen to the floor as she advances, footsteps silent, the sleeves of her jumper hanging down a little over her hands. If you’d ever asked the Doctor what the goddess of time might look like, he’d never have imagined her as a shop girl from London, but seeing Rose before him, he has to concede that no one else would have looked quite right. It’s a miracle she’s still standing.

From behind him, the Dalek emperor screams. “This is the abomination! Exterminate!” 

Blue light jumps towards Rose, and the Doctor can’t look, he can’t watch, but he can’t look away either. Rose’s eyes narrow, and she lifts her hand. Instead of turning her bones to light under her skin, the laser hits her palm and Rose doesn’t flinch. It reflects back towards the Dalek who fired, and the Dalek dies with an unearthly scream, cut short.

“I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself,” Rose says. The words shiver through the space between them. She looks over the Doctor’s head, and he turns to follow her gaze. 

On the wall, they’re there, picked out in relief against the industrial discolouration of the station: ‘Bad Wolf Corporation’. The paradox settles into place, the tangled knot of timelines surrounding the Doctor and Rose and the TARDIS and this place suddenly going smooth, as if a cat’s fur run the wrong way by an unseen hand has been set to rights once more. Rose lifts her hand again, and gestures with her fingers. 

“I take the words, I scatter them in time and space, a message to lead myself here.” 

The letters jump off the wall and disappear. The Bad Wolf. It all slots into place. All along, they’d been running towards this moment, this moment he couldn’t see. What’s the use of being able to see all of time and space stretching before you when you can’t see what’s right in front of your face? The Doctor’s head aches. 

Rose’s face is covered in a sheen of tears. She blinks. The balance of the universe hangs on her every shaking breath.

“Rose, you’ve got to stop this,” the Doctor pleads. She’s burning, gold light shimmering under her skin, and the vortex turning in her eyes. He’s going to lose her. He can’t figure out how to reach out. “You’ve got to stop this now. You’ve got the entire vortex running through your head. You’re gonna burn.” 

Rose cocks her head, assessing. The Doctor feels like so much prey beneath the weight of her gaze. She looks at him, searching his face with her golden eyes. “I want you safe, my Doctor,” she says. Her voice feels like a caress. “Protected from the false god.”

Rose’s face is tear-streaked, a sure sign of the agony of having her atoms unmade by the TARDIS and reconstituted to house her heart inside Rose’s veins. Her eyes close briefly against the radiation burning through her. When she opens them again, they’re lit from within; a molten gold. Her gaze is distant, and the Doctor wonders what horrors she’s seeing; what timelines are stretching out in front of her, breaking off in a shower of sparks or ending abruptly, fading into nothingness, like everything eventually does.

“You cannot hurt me,” the Dalek emperor interrupts, voice a harsh grate against the Doctor’s brain. “I am the immortal.”

“You are tiny,” Rose says, her eyes flicking up to the screen behind the Doctor, assessing the emperor within. Rose’s gaze hardens. She brings up her hand. The Doctor’s breath catches in his throat, fear sizzling like acid in his gut. “I can see the whole of time and space. Every single atom of your existence, and I divide them.”

The Doctor’s hearts squeeze.

“Everything must come to dust. All things. Everything dies. The Time War Ends.” Rose closes her fist and the Doctor feels the ripple through the timelines. 

Around them, the Daleks disappear into shimmering gold dust, summarily erased. The Doctor has no love for the Daleks, and would spare them no mercy of his own, after what they have done, but to be gutted from existence with the wave of an imperious hand seems like a call that no one person should be able to make. Rose doesn’t seem to at all be having the same second thoughts, as she watches, eyes fixed on the viewscreen, the barest hint of triumph in the set of her mouth.

“I will not die!” protests the emperor, “I cannot die!” 

The Daleks die. All of them. Every last one. The Doctor hears the howling in the timelines, as they fray and snap and shred, as Rose undoes an entire race of beings from reality. When it’s finished, Rose looks down at him again. She wobbles on her feet. Her trainers are still scuffed with something they ran through three trips ago, the laces done up tight and her jeans bunching around her ankles.

“Rose,” the Doctor beseeches from where he’s sprawled at her feet, “you’ve done it, now stop. Just let go.” 

“How can I let go of this?” Rose asks, and the Doctor thought he was afraid before, but now he’s terrified. If Rose wants to hold the power, until it burns her from the inside out, he can’t stop her. She can end him just as effectively as the Daleks, probably with much less effort. 

“I bring life,” Rose says, and something wrong happens in a corridor of the station. Something sickening lurches in the Doctor’s stomach, and the feeling crawls over his skin. 

“But this is wrong!” the Doctor protests. He has to get through to her, has to reach Rose under the haze of the power thrumming through her. Even now, he wonders if he’ll be too late. If he was too late the moment she stepped out of the TARDIS. He pushes himself up to his knees. “You can’t control life and death!”

“But I can. The sun and the moon, the day and night.” Rose shifts back a step, lifting a shaking hand towards her face. “Why do they hurt?” 

“The power’s gonna kill you, and it’s my fault.” The Doctor stands. 

“I can see everything. All that is, all that was. All that ever could be.” Rose blinks, more tears falling down her cheeks, and the shimmering light around her wanes. She seems to be wavering on the edge of something. Hope turns from a dying candlelight to a flickering flame in the Doctor’s chest.

“That’s what I see, all the time,” the Doctor says, stepping towards her. “Doesn’t it drive you mad?” 

As the Doctor closes the distance between them, he reaches for her. The kernel of a solution solidifies in the back of his mind. He can handle the radiation for long enough to get them both into the TARDIS and then away from the station. Then whatever will happen, will happen, and Rose will be safe. He just has to get close enough to her.

“My head,” Rose says, and the pain in her voice sets the Doctor’s teeth on edge. It’s now or never. He throws caution to the wind.

“Come here.”

“It’s killin’ me.” Rose whimpers, hand pressed to her forehead. She’s shaking all over, the ends of her hair trembling with every movement. The golden light around her has settled solely into her eyes, as she looks up at him.    


The Doctor reaches for her face, fingers skating along her jaw and up into her hair. He feels the breath Rose takes. Her face turns up, mouth slightly parted. The Doctor leans in. “I think you need a doctor.” 

The Doctor keeps his eyes open, holding Rose’s gaze, as he fits their mouths together and feels Rose melt against him, her hands coming up to hold his arms. She yields under his touch, and the Doctor blinks, opening himself to the power seeking a new, sturdier vessel. It spreads through him, sinking into his every particle, twining around his hearts, settling against the base of his spine, molten and indolent. It presses against his skin, from the inside, seeking to escape in a cloud of shimmering light. 

Timelines spool out in his mind, but the Doctor pays them no mind, and neither does he hear the chiming song, or the whispered words of the vortex, the tempting cries of all the  _ what-ifs _ and  _ could-have-beens _ are ignored. The agony of the  _ if-you’d-done-this-differentlys _ sloughs off under the slick pressure of Rose’s mouth against his own, under the firming grip of her hands, under the way she breathes him in, licking into his mouth like she’s dying for the touch of him. 

The Doctor gentles the kiss the moment he feels her falter, caught up as she is in the snare of relief. The fire burns along his every nerve as he pulls away. It hurts, but it’s nothing. The Doctor grits his teeth against it, and shunts the feelings to the back of his mind. 

Rose sways in his hold. Her eyes flutter, like she’s trying to come back to him, but can’t. The Doctor shifts, gathering her in. She goes limp against him, and he lays her down, hands gentle. He cradles her head in one hand, careful. She’s precious, this fragile human, who was willing to give herself up to save him. 

To save broken down, old and miserable, him. He’s never deserved Rose, not since that first night when she saved him from himself and not any time since then when she’s done the same. He can feel the burn of time and space under his skin, and he prays to the vast unknowable universe that if he regenerates and she’ll still have him, that he’ll finally be worthy of her. That he’ll be someone she could love freely and unabashedly, that he can love her the way that she deserves to be loved. 

He’s not sure she’ll remember this when she wakes. He almost hopes she doesn’t. He’ll have enough memories for both of them.

**Author's Note:**

> Come chat on [tumblr](http://sequencefairy.tumblr.com) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/warpspeed_chic).


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